and goes back to eating his bread and cheese. “Good,” he mutters.
I make myself smaller. It was a spiteful thing for me to say, but so is his open doubt over whether or not we should be here for Enzo. I watch him from my cloak, wondering whether he will glance in my direction and give me a hint of what his thoughts are, but he doesn’t look my way again.
Beside me, Violetta stirs. She blinks while facing the arena’s center, then tilts her head. Magiano and I both still as we watch her. “Is it them?” I whisper to my sister.
Before Violetta can respond, a silhouette drops down behind us with a silent thud. I jump to my feet. It’s Sergio.
He hefts a blade in one hand. “I spy our favorite Dagger,” he says with a smile.
Raffaele Laurent Bessette
As he leaves the palace, Raffaele presses his hands together over and over, but he can’t seem to stop their trembling. A wide hood covers him, partially shielding him from the storm. He looks over his shoulder. Inquisitors escorted him as far as the palace gates, but now that he has reached the main streets, they stay behind and allow him to have his freedom.
He blinks water from his eyes, then hurries down the streets until he melts into the shadows. Teren will leave the palace tomorrow, no doubt about it—exactly the goal Maeve had set for him when bringing him into the palace. Now the city loses their near-invincible Lead Inquisitor, and the queen loses a powerful bodyguard. The Beldish navy draws closer.
Still, Raffaele frowns as he walks. Teren is not gone yet, and now he is as furious as a wounded beast. No doubt there are still soldiers watching him right now. He walks in a wide arc, far from the arena where he knows he must end up. I have to hide quickly. Out here, the queen cannot protect him from Teren’s wrath. If the Lead Inquisitor finds him, he will kill him. Raffaele searches for any signs of Teren’s energy nearby, then changes his course, careful to leave the signals he had agreed upon with the other Daggers.
A deep line in the mud with his boot, clearly visible from the air. A whistle, nearly lost in the storm’s roar, mimicking a lonely falcon. A glass ring on his finger that reflects the lightning whenever it flashes.
He hopes Lucent is watching from somewhere high, and that she has raised the alarm.
Moments later, he calls on his memory of the underground maze of catacombs beneath the city. He makes his way through a labyrinth of alleys before finally vanishing through a small, unmarked door.
The sound of pouring water echoes everywhere down in the tunnels. Raffaele keeps one hand gripped tightly around his cloak, and the other against the wall. Water soaks his boots and keeps the steps dangerously slick.
“North, south, west, east,” he murmurs to himself as he goes. “The Piazza of Three Angels, the Canterino Canal, the statue to Holy Sapientus.” The landmarks appear in his mind in a map. He inches along in the blackness, completely blind. Glittering threads of energy flicker all around him, connecting everything to everything else, however faintly. He reaches out and tugs gently on them, feeling the way the energy of the air connects to the walls, to the aboveground. If there were even a bit of light, he knows he would see his breath rising in clouds before him, warming the icy air.
“Left. Right. Right. Straight.”
The labyrinth continues to branch as he goes farther down. He has never been here during such heavy rain before. Sometimes, water sloshes up to his knees. If parts of the tunnels are flooded, I might trap myself in a corner and drown. Raffaele forces the thought away and replaces it with a still surface, a calm to keep the panic at bay. He keeps moving, relying only on his hand on the wall and the map of threads in his mind. How did such a storm like this come so suddenly?
Left. Left. Straight. Right.
Abruptly, Raffaele pauses. Frowns. It lasts only an instant, a fleeting moment of someone’s energy from the surface. He waits for a second, reaching tentatively out with his own power. Strange. And familiar.
But the feeling has already faded away, and the storm returns in full force.
Raffaele hesitates awhile longer, until the water forces him to continue moving again. He shakes his head. The threads of energy in the storm are overwhelming in